Gizmodo

Columbo. Kojak. Murder, She Wrote. These are the shows most commonly mentioned when describing Peacock’s new show, Poker Face. And, it being from Rian Johnson, the mastermind behind the Knives Out films (as well as The Last Jedi), the comparisons are accurate and logical. Poker Face is, at its core, about a woman…Read more...

Spotify informed its employees on Monday that it will be cutting jobs this week, making it the latest in a wave of mass layoffs following hiring surges during the height of the covid-19 pandemic. CEO and Spotify co-founder, Daniel Ek, announced the change in a memo to staff, saying the company was forced to cut costs…Read more...

After soliciting opinions from its users via survey earlier this month, OpenAI has apparently settled on a price of $42 per month for the premium version of ChatGPT, the viral AI chatbot.

New reboots of House and Friday the 13th could be on the way. A few more guest stars join Doctor Who’s next season. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania screenwriter Jeff Loveness teases the Quantum Realm as Marvel’s Jodorowsky’s Dune. Plus, get a tiny sneak peek at Picard’s final season. Spoilers now!

Former President Donald Trump has a problem. He wants to run again in 2024, and he’s going to need another blowout time on social media to give him that public and media attention he entirely craves. The thing is, he has already agreed to a “social media exclusivity term” with Truth Social, the platform he helped get…Read more...

Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's regular roundup of all the coolest nerdy toy news—now on Mondays! This week, we’re taking a look at Michelle Yeoh’s plastic Transformers debut. Also, the perfect collector action figure comes with a Toy Story twist, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’s coolest rides get very tiny.

Alarmed by all the plastic packaging you see when you go shopping? You’re not alone. An interactive art exhibit called The Plastic Bag Store showcases what an entire grocery store may look like if everything—including the food itself—was made of plastic.

If you’ve ever been offered the opportunity to donate money to plant a tree to offset a purchase, you’ve probably guessed that trees naturally store carbon. Forests are an invaluable source of carbon storage around the world; one would assume that forests that have been cut down but are regrowing trees are also…Read more...

About 20 to 40 million years ago, entelodonts—immense, snaggletoothed, pig-like beasts—trotted throughout Eurasia and North America. But despite their 3-foot jaws studded with an alarming number of triangular teeth, these barnyard nightmares apparently had a typically porcine diet.Read more...

The second episode of The Last of Us was all about beginnings: the beginning of the viral outbreak that would basically end the world, and the beginning of Joel and Ellie’s story as the pair, along with Tess, set out into the open world of Boston. Helmed by Last of Us game director and series co-showrunner Neil…Read more...

Every couple of years, Marvel Comics’ Avengers shakes up its roster so the creative team on hand can tell new stories that will eventually rise to cataclysmic heights. Since 2018, Jason Aaron and Ed McGuinness’ run has put Earth’s Mightiest Heroes through the ringer, but that run’s on its way to winding down after the…Read more...

The success of Universal and Blumhouse’s M3GAN during the month can be attributed to a few factors, but it definitely resonated with queer audiences. Maybe it was because of her hair, the way she always looks like she’s throwing shade, or maybe just that she’s doing murders: call it what you want, she found that niche.

At the start of the month, A-1 Pictures premiered Nier Automata Version 1.1a, an animated adaptation of the popular action-RPG. Only a handful of episodes have come out, and now that’ll be all viewers have for the foreseeable future, as the series is taking a little hiatus.

Jason Momoa’s heart still belongs to the seas of DC. Despite everything going on in the DC movie landscape, the actor recently (and boldly) declared that he’ll “always be Aquaman. Ain’t anyone coming in there and taking shit.”

Movies often use alien abductions to set up the extraterrestrial danger to come. In the aftermath of those abductions, the witness or person left behind is often portrayed as an outcast who may or may not be fully right; it’s a well-worn trope, but when it works, it works.

We left 2022 behind in the dust weeks ago, but there’s still awards to be given for the previous year’s top movies and TV shows. It’s the same for anime too, as Crunchyroll finally unveiled the list of nominees for its annual Anime Awards ceremony.

Marvel’s upcoming 2024 flick Captain America: New World Order is mostly comprised of MCU alums such as Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson and Tim Blake Nelson as the Leader. But it’s got a few notable newcomers sprinkled in, such as Harrison Ford’s Thaddeus Ross and Shira Haas as Sabra. The movie’s now gained another cast…Read more...

Earlier in the week, Netflix revealed its slate of tentpole films for 2023, and Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon was featured among that prestigious lineup. Snyder’s movies tend to catch folks’ attention, and that’ll likely be the case for this film, especially as it’s being split into two movies that are being filmed…Read more...

When Kylee Gray first laid eyes on the creature, she couldn’t help it: She gasped aloud. Then, the Australian park ranger picked up the cane toad and the surprises kept coming. Gray simply “couldn’t believe how big and heavy it was.” And she was right to be shocked.Read more...

It’s hard to believe that the mighty, stone-faced U.S. Army would ever adapt adorable cat babies as its representatives, but this is the internet in the year of our lord 2023. Anything is possible.Read more...

Deep in the Stone Age, when Neanderthals still lived alongside Homo sapiens, our ancestors might have been agog at a green light in the night sky. Now, that light—C/2022 E3 (ZTF) (more familiarly, the Green Comet)—is back.Read more...

The Lunar New Year kicks off with centennials for Disney at its parks and Warner Bros. with special global events, but it’s Universal Studios that’s shaking things up with the announcement of two theme experiences opening outside of the coasts. And yes, one is a year-round Halloween Horror Nights project in Sin City’s…Read more...

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At one point in this week’s Immortal X-Men #10, Charles Xavier ponders the the true nature of his X-Men—and how he shaped warriors out of children to police his own people. It’s a chilling re-examination for a “practical idealist” like Charles to make, framing the question of why Mutants are always fighting each other…Read more...

HBO’s Game of Thrones set many of its stars on the path to fame, including Emilia Clarke. Over eight seasons she played Daenerys Targaryen, becoming one of the show’s most memorable and controversial characters. Now that HBO has a prequel series focusing on Dany’s family, you’d think Clarke would be eagerly tuning in,…Read more...

Elon Musk’s tweets to his more than 126 million followers have been credited for boosting popularity in everything from AAA video games to meme cryptocurrencies coins, but somehow, according to the CEO, that same Twitter bump doesn’t count when Tesla’s concerned.

Here’s a fun thing you can do if you’re Disney and own virtually all of the top studios and major movie franchises that exist: you can spew your releases over the yearly box office like an invading army, determined to decimate all foes. And thus, Disney has announced 21 release dates for mysterious new films in…Read more...

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been fined for not wearing his seatbelt while filming a social media video in a moving car. Sunak was visiting three towns in the north of England when he posted the video promoting his ‘leveling up’ program on Instagram. The video has since been taken down but can be seen in a…Read more...

Hitting the viral internet jackpot might seem like a combination of algorithm and luck (with, sure, a dose of talent or skill). But it’s not all the result of a pre-programmed black box of computer coded decision making. Employees at TikTok and ByteDance reportedly have a hidden tool up their sleeves: a feature…Read more...

Words truly can’t do justice to just how important and meaningful the music of John Williams is to the history of cinema. But if words can’t do it, maybe a moving picture can do the trick.Read more...

It’s been a rough few weeks for the U.S. air industry and tech. First, Southwest Airlines was forced to cancel an astounding 16,700 holiday flights due, in part, to outdated scheduling software. Just weeks later the Federal Aviation Administration drastically had to ground all domestic flights because of a corrupted…Read more...

Do you hate when you land on an alien planet, do something foolish like nuke it or die on it, only to realize you were on Earth the entire time? It happens more often than you’d think in fiction (seriously, check out the massive TV Tropes page). In fact, it’s completely overused, but there’s a reason it’s overused—and…Read more...

Weight loss drugs are becoming more accessible as regulators green-light new kinds of treatments. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the weight loss drug Wegovy in 2021, and a high level of interest in the drug combined with manufacturing issues have led to an ongoing shortage.Read more...

ChatGPT, the multi-talented AI-chatbot, has another skill to add to its LinkedIn profile: crafting sophisticated “polymorphic” malware.Read more...

Everybody’s favorite figurehead for the money grubbing ways of the pharmaceutical industry, Martin “Pharma Bro” Shkreli, has been working the angles ever since he tiptoed out of prison in May last year. He’s taken potshots into the tech industry through a kind of “crypto-based drug discovery platform,” and he’s been…Read more...

A seat liner from the damaged Soyuz MS-22 capsule at the International Space Station has been relocated to Endurance, converting the SpaceX Crew Dragon to a five-person “lifeboat” should the crew be forced to evacuate in the event of an extreme emergency.

In what’s becoming a welcome trend, another genre movie that was originally slated to go directly to streaming is coming to theaters first. It happened with Blue Beetle, Smile, and Evil Dead Rise, and now, it’s happening with The Boogeyman.Read more...

Super gonorrhea has infected people in the United States for the first known time. This week, Massachusetts public health officials announced the discovery of two gonorrhea cases appearing to display increased resistance to all known antibiotic classes that can be used against it. These cases were thankfully still…Read more...

The Southwest’s water crisis has reached a new, desperate benchmark. For the first time, more than 500 households in Maricopa County, Arizona have had their water cut-off.

It’s been a while since the sheer brutality of Prime Video’s Invincible dropped on the streamer. Season one’s hyper-violent superhero family drama showed us the destruction of a one-man alien invasion posing as a hero and a good father. Really, I still shudder thinking about impactful season finale.Read more...

Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that publishes Dungeons & Dragons, has been under fan scrutiny since a draft of its new Open Game License leaked earlier this month, and over the past two weeks all hellfire broke loose in the fandom. The company had to backtrack and apologize and then announce entirely new…Read more...

Following the banning of third-party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific, which access the social media platform’s application program interface (API), Twitter has retroactively edited its developer agreement after issuing a vague statement about the bans.

It makes complete sense for a company to want to protect a well-established brand, but does Rolex really need to worry about consumers potentially mistaking a colorful $25 learning clock for a luxury time piece that costs tens of thousands of dollars more?

Cobra Kai never dies, but it is coming to an end. Netflix just announced that the hit Karate Kid spinoff show has been renewed for a sixth season, which will also be its last. But show creators Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg, and Josh Heald simultaneously released a letter letting fans know: this is exactly how they…Read more...

It’s neat that my 2021 Dell XPS 15, with its mobile RTX 3050 Nvidia graphics card, now runs Cyberpunk 2077 on max settings like it’s installed locally. It’s running off servers exclusive to Nvidia’s GeForce Now Ultimate, launching this week in select regions.

Prosecutors are demanding disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes reside in prison instead of an expensive estate while she appeals her prison sentence. Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison last year for fraud related to her blood-test startup company.Read more...

Analysis of the three returning manikins will uncover the extent to which Orion and a promising new radiation vest will protect human crews during future missions to deep space.

ChatGPT writes well enough to fool scientific reviewers, ace AP tests in English and computer science—it even passed the bar exam. The bot sparked a lot of hand-wringing about an upcoming plague of cheating, and many educators are scrambling to get out in front of the problem. ChatGPT is already banned at public…Read more...

To be honest, 2023 really started with M3GAN. But now that she’s introduced herself to the world, it’s time to look at all the other genre films—the ones without murderous dancing AI dolls—that will be in theaters this year, and it’s an impressive list.Read more...

T-Mobile announced that hackers accessed data on 37 million of its customers, in a Thursday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The massive security breach impacts both prepaid and postpaid customer accounts, and is the second notable hack in less than two years. The company said it is in the process…Read more...